Random posts, ramblings and exercises in writing, by a translator

Seven thousand languages to reach everyone

It would take 83 languages to reach 80 percent of all the people in the world, and over 7,000 languages to reach everyone. — Evolution and Revolution in Translation Management (source)

Current world population is ~6,830,586,985 (source), or 6.8 billion. Worldwide internet users are ~1,733,993,741 (source), or 1.7 billion. This means that ~25.4% of the world population use or have access to the internet.

So do we need > 7,000 languages to reach these 25.4%? Here is the Top 10 list (source):

English

Chinese

Spanish

Japanese

French

Portuguese

German

Arabic

Russian

Korean

No big surprise? Sure, but Arabic had the highest internet usage growth rate of them all – 1,900% growth from 2000 to 2009 (yes, that’s one thousand and nine hundred percent; more than 200% per year), followed by Russian (1,400%) and Chinese (1,000%).